A recent New Yorker article takes on the rather popular topic of happiness. Positive psychology has been growing as a trend in the U.S. for a while now, as has popular interest in behavioral sciences as a guiding force – if you’re in doubt, just check out your local bookstore’s display of nonfiction bestsellers. The article in question brings up a number of interesting findings for the work we do and for societal organizing principles in general. Among them: economic growth is not always convincingly linked with happiness, poor people are not necessarily much more dissatisfied than rich people, people adapt to improved circumstances, people don’t necessarily know what will make them happy, etc. These ideas are pretty common lately, floating around everything from TED talks to self-help books, and many major religions have been promoting some variation of the “money is not equal to happiness” equation for millenia.

So what does that mean for development, for Catapult’s mission of serving impoverished communities? An implicit thread running through the research suggests that much of international economic development may be focused more on satisfying the needs and reactions of the people helping than the communities supposedly being helped. Not a new issue in nonprofit work – there’s a continual societal questioning of whether someone’s really giving or working or helping to satisfy their own needs for guilt alleviation or pride or meaning, whether any work is truly altruistic, whether aid is imposed on communities, whether there are unintended consequences. These ideas are behind much of the modern movement for participatory development, for listening to the needs of various stakeholders, for human-centered processes.

There’s of course a broader issue here though. A friend of mine once said that she doesn’t really see the point of international development – we’re not all that happy with all of our stuff, so why should we assume that other people will be? What right do we even have to think we know the course that a society should take? There are a range of questions here: health advances can lead to longer lives, but are they better lives? What cultural practices and advantages are inherently lost through globalization/modernization? Is it really possible to do development work in such a sensitive and thoughtful way as to make sure that it’s sustainable, maintains cultural practices, and skirts our own pitfalls? In the end if we do it all perfectly, will anyone even be happy for it? Or will everyone forget a few generations after that there was ever such global poverty, and focus instead on a new version of inequality or a new goal to strive for?

Of course, there are a number of possible answers here, and I’m not necessarily committed to any single one of them. You can challenge the research – a great deal of it is based on direct surveys, which can be subject to all sorts of cultural issues – how do people interpret happiness, will people self-report accurately, will they report honestly, are there social pressures that distort answers, etc. You could say, like the New Yorker does, that happiness might be besides the point. While a certain brand of happiness is part of the American dream, it’s not necessarily every culture’s goal. Lots of different people feel there are lots of different purposes to life, and not all of them include happiness. Some like passion, some like serenity, some like service of a higher calling, some prefer pure variety of experience. Or, you could argue that only after basic needs are satisfied do people even have the luxury of worrying about whether to pursue happiness or some other goal. The literature does show that people subject to extreme trauma or lack of basic needs are indeed dissatisfied, and beyond that, as Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen Fund argues, development can aim to bring people to a point where obstacles are removed, and they can feel free to make choices and pursue lives of dignity – even if they may not automatically do those things. We could see development as related to maslow’s hierarchy on a societal level – only after the entire group’s basic needs are satisfied can the whole society move to consider esteem, love, self-actualization.  Another approach is to try to increase the efficiency of the happiness generated – for some thoughts on this idea, check out the New Economics Foundation Happy Planet Index.

Further philosophical debates can riff on those themes still – do people ever really make choices, what do subjective feelings even matter, in the long run…and so forth. At which point, like many people, you could just follow your heart, your gut, your anger, whatever guiding emotional compass works. I’m neutral on most of these arguments, so I’d be curious to hear how others have dealt with these internal and external debates.